


And I Am Reminded

by alonsos



Category: Outlander (TV), Outlander Series - Diana Gabaldon
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Guilt, Loss, Major Character Injury, Miscarriage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-03
Updated: 2017-07-03
Packaged: 2018-11-22 18:56:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11386353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alonsos/pseuds/alonsos
Summary: Claire Fraser knows pain... she is a medic, she has seen suffering firsthand. When it hits her, though, she feels nothing other than the steady beat of her heart, andwishes it wasn't so—Jamie Fraser knows pain, too... it has followed him since he was a child. He has always reminded steady. When it hits him this time, though, it is a loss so unfathomable that he cannot react,he can't breathe—They have known pain. They have not known pain like this.





	And I Am Reminded

She had never seen Joe Abernathy cry.

Even at their worsts, through sixteen-hour surgeries, emergency takeoffs, and dangerous locations, they’d made through. Their worst days always ended with silences and drinking, a determination to make it through the next day. This, though... Joe’s soft voice was ragged, calling out to her from the black. He sounded empty, as though someone had taken all of his energy and drained it out through an IV and left him for good. 

His words pulled her up from the dark. 

“Claire.”

Joe never called her _Claire._ Surely something had happened, and fear struck her like lightning but she was _too slow and groggy to move-_

“Claire, I’m here. Wake up.”

She let out a little muffled noise as her eyelids fluttered open. “Joe.”

“Yeah,” he said gently, “I’m here.”

The steady beep of the heart monitor was the only sound that filled the room. It was incredibly bright and she blinked a few times at the harshness of it. Joe sat next to her, his face as grave and still as if he’d been carved from stone. Claire’s breath caught in her throat at the sight—he looked as if he’d been aged ten, even fifteen years since she last saw him.

 _Wait,_ she thought, _when did I last see Joe? What...?_

“What happened?” She breathed, trying to formulate hours and dates and events in her muddled mind. 

Tears began to course down his cheeks and he looked down at his bandaged hands. “Claire... I’m so sorry,” he sobbed quietly, “I’m so... sorry.”

Her pulse quickened in sheer alarm. His tone, his expression, everything was so wrong, so out of place. She suddenly wished Jamie were there, and the longing of it struck her like no other sensation. “Joe.”

“Your... your team’s vehicle crashed,” he said from behind his hands, which hid his broken expression from her. “It was chaos. We were right behind you, there was... nothing we could do because of the attack, we sat there for hours unable to... to move...” His voice trailed off in harsh sobs.

“You’re scaring me, Joe,” Claire said, the panic wiping all drowsiness from the pain medicine. Her need for Jamie seemed to grow to a painful degree, and it was only when her hand flew to her belly out of habit that the dread struck her.

It felt like she’d just been submerged in ice water, in the depths of a black hole, like a knife had pried its way through each of her ribs to strike her where it hurt the most. Every fear she’d ever experienced seemed to choke her like a vice. 

Deep down she knew what Joe would say, but she asked anyway. She had to ask.

Her voice was as cold and empty as space. “Joe, what happened?”

Joe looked back up at her with pain in his eyes, on his face, in the words that fell from his lips. The words were empty, too, and Claire knew she only had seconds before they hit her. Before the bombs really exploded.

Her hands tightened around her stomach as Joe spoke in a quiet, tearful tone that numbed her to every bone in her body. Even the image and longing for Jamie fell away with the cold. 

Sometime later, in the dark by herself, she finally let out an agonized sigh that would have been a sob if she could manage it. 

_“No...”_

* * *

 James Fraser was a strong man. He liked to think he could hold himself together in the worst of situations; be everyone’s rock in the midst of the storm. He also knew that he could be that and still _feel._ When their mother passed, when their brother fell to sickness, when their father had a heart attack behind the wheel of his truck... He’d been their rock, but he also allowed tears to fall down his cheeks like spring rainfall because he had _loved_ them. Because he felt for them, and mourned them, and wanted to cherish them. He knew it was okay to feel.

And when a soldier from the base called him that morning to transfer a call from an undisclosed location, he got the sudden sensation that it was not good news that waited for him on the other line. That he’d have to be that rock again—much sooner than he’d ever hoped. 

When her colleague, Joe, spoke to him in hushed and tired tones, Jamie nodded and said his goodbye and hung up. He registered everything around him like he was watching it outside his own body: the way the sunlight danced across the bedsheets, Claire’s red bathrobe hanging on the door, the way the steam from his cup of coffee shone in the morning light. The framed wedding pictures on the shelf. The way his own shocked eyes stared back at him from their full length mirror.

It was only _after_ he catalogued every single item in their bedroom— _their_ bedroom, it was their _home—_ that Joe’s words really hit him, doused him like a bucket of ice water, as though he’d jumped off a cliff and-

And he expected the tears, he really did. His breath caught in his chest like he’d been stabbed. His body constricted, folded in against itself like he was falling apart, crashing into their bedroom floor. He _was_ a rock, and the rock was shattering, and he willed the tears to come like a release but they never did. 

Jamie felt everything at once and he still felt as numb as ice, and his cheeks remained dry. 

* * *

Claire wondered if she was angry or just tired. The last two days had been an endless downpour of exhaustion and numbness and medication, but now that she was on a flight back to Scotland and trying to conjure Jamie’s face, she realized she couldn’t conjure anything. All she could think of was the emptiness in her, a hollowness from the excitement she had felt for three full months.

_Three months._

Happiness, joy, excitement, and giddiness. In that time she’d imagined _so_ much about the little life in her belly, the possibilities of the future. She’d dreamed of sparkling blue eyes and dark curls, or wispy auburn waves and warm brown eyes. She had dreamed of ten fingers and ten toes, a bubbly laugh, high cheekbones behind the roundness of infant cheeks and tiny, translucent ears. Of warm nuzzles, dreamy smiles, first teeth, first words, first day of school, first everythings, _the_ _first breath, goddammit—_

And everything else that she had dreamed of now conjured nothing in her. Not even the image of her husband—the father of this dream child, the love of her _life,_ the blood of her blood—could spark anything in her. It was as if a flame had gone out within her chest. 

As for the anger... She knew, _God she knew,_ that he couldn’t have been there when it happened. It was beyond all possibility for him to be there, in a war zone, among so much pain. It was her decision to go on this aid mission and she knew it, she curled around that guilt like a lifeline and didn’t let go.

But she still couldn’t forget the fact that he wasn’t _there_. Not one call, not one word from him. Joe had told her that he’d called to let him know—he didn’t say much about it, but it was clear enough. He’d spoken to him when she was lost in the waves of grief and Jamie had not called out to her in response. 

She wasn’t enraged, but she was numb enough to be able to wonder. Why, _why, why, why? Why_ hadn’t he called? Did he blame her? Did he blame himself? 

Did he even _hurt?_

Claire imagined tears rolling down her face as the plane began its descent into Edinburgh, desperately wishing that she could feel something. Anything.

* * *

She sat on the couch later that day, staring at the mug of tea in her hands, not saying anything. Jamie sat in the armchair across from her, glancing at his wife’s face every few seconds, the words he’d managed to form in his mind getting caught in his throat. The clock ticked in the background. The chair creaked as Jamie shifted uncomfortably. If he was all nerves, she was ice.

He couldn’t bear the silence. He had waited for her at the base for her flight to land, he’d waited for her colleagues to check her out in the clinic (away from him), and he had waited for her to come out to the car with him. She’s accepted his gentle embrace and a kiss on the cheek, but otherwise remained a complete statue the entire way home.

Now, without the sounds of traffic or the sights of the landscape as they drove to Inverness, there was no distraction. The clock’s ticking grew to an unbearable degree, Jamie felt like it was daggers into his heart with each _tick, tick, tick—_

He stood up in an instant and crossed the space in a single stride, falling to her knees. “Claire,” he begged. Willing this statue to respond.  

She looked down into his blue eyes, seeing him, _registering_ him, but unable to let herself fall into his open embrace. Before, she would have without hesitation. Those arms were her _home._

A hundred meaningless words could have fallen out of her mouth in that moment, all of them inadequate, but without thinking she blinked and finally spoke to her husband. “You didn’t call.”  

A sharp intake of breath. “I wanted to. _God,_ Claire...”

“You didn’t, though,” she replied. There was no accusation in her voice, but somehow the emptiness cut him far worse than anger would have.

He stared back at her. “How could I?” He asked raggedly. “I didn’t know where ye even _were,_ they wouldn’t tell me _anything.”_

That surprised her, but it didn’t rouse her. “You know Joe. Or my staff.”

Jamie looked away for a few moments, hiding the hurt that flashed across his face like lightning. “I couldn’t, Claire, Lord help me but I _couldn’t_. I couldn’t... move.”

She stared at the straight line of his nose, the light on his high cheekbones, the fire of his hair. Remembering when those features made her heart beat wildly in her chest, she began to wonder if she would ever feel again. If she even could.

“It was too early to tell,” she said numbly, not knowing what else to say to him. “They didn’t know if it was a boy... or a girl...”

Jamie’s form seized up with a painful lurch, as though he’d been struck across the face. He gripped the edge of the table, his entire arm trembling, and with an absentminded, clinical observation Claire knew he was struggling not to break his own fingers in the effort that he held onto the wood. In pain, anger, or grief, however, she could not say.

He still didn’t look up at Claire, but didn’t move from the spot at her feet. “I didna cry, I couldn’t...” His voice trailed off, thick with emotion and pain and everything else she could think of. He couldn’t even look up at her, he fixated his gaze on the fabric of their worn out couch and let his pain slowly tumble out of his mouth. “I wanted to let that phone call crush me, to take me away to the place where ye were so I could feel it, too. I wanted to take yer pain away, Claire, but I... I couldna feel a damn thing. The tears wouldn’t come.” As he spoke his voice grew rougher and sadder and _older,_ and she realized that he had aged in the short time she’d been gone, too, and they were both hundreds of years old in their newfound grief, unable to voice it to the other.  

But his words... His inability to _feel,_ to express his pain in a way he could comprehend, was like the first ray of spring sunlight, even in all its tragedy. That he couldn’t even _cry_ or _feel_ or _breathe..._ Claire very suddenly realized she was not alone, and even if he had not carried that child, his grief was a mirror image to her own. The thought of it let out a shuddering sob from deep within her chest. Jamie looked up at her, then, finally seeing her as the ice around her melted.

“You couldn’t cry,” she said, her voice quivering, and let herself fall into the emotion she’d been unable to feel for days on end. “You couldn’t _cry,_ oh god, Jamie, I couldn’t either, I felt like a _corpse because I couldn’t cry for our baby—"_

Claire fell into his arms, sobbing, letting the pain finally rip her apart from the inside out. The numbness that she’d felt for so long somehow made the breaking so much more intense than she could have possibly imagined, but the catharsis of it led a wave of guilt rush over her head and she couldn’t _breathe-_

But Jamie’s arms were around her, grounding her, holding her so close to him that she could feel the stuttering beats of his heart, melding her to him so they could grieve together. His sobs echoed hers and they felt like the only two people in the world. They were one force, radiating a loss so intense that there was nothing else around them, no other sensation besides the gasping of their breaths that they had denied themselves for days that did not seem to end. The ice around them, the overwhelming _numbness,_ seemed to crack with each sob, each tiny fracture expanding until it shattered around them like diamonds in the afternoon sunlight.

They held onto each other, and finally, _finally,_ surfaced. 

**Author's Note:**

> -God I love them and I am sorry 
> 
> -The title is inspired by the poem ["How Tired I Am, My Love"](http://inspireportal.com/poetry-how-tired-my-love-by-nikka-ursula/) by Nikka Ursula


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